Would any metal fossils remain after 65 million years?

[chrismackey]

Would any metal, specifically colbalt chrome fossilize? I'm asking because I have a book where a time portal opens to 65 million years ago, a character stabs another and the blade breaks off in the dead man's chest, and he gets buried under a mudflow. They find his fossilized remains in the present day, but would the broken blade still be stuck in his bones? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks! :)

[Kane]

I would guess that any blade, made of standard materials such as steel, would oxidize (rust) and might leave a powdery trace in the approximate shape of the blade, but little else. 

[chrismackey]

Thanks very much, Kane

[Thecosmilia Trichitoma]

However, after the blade rusted away the empty space left behind could fill, leaving a cast of the original blade.

[chrismackey]

Thanks very much for the info, Thecosmilia.

[siteseer]

I don't remember the title, because I just leafed through it at a bookstore a few (or was it several?) years ago, but it had a line about almost nothing of our seemingly indestructible civilization (with all its advanced plastics and strengthened alloys) surviving in the rock record 5-10 million years from now.  We'd be lucky to leave a rusty streak.  So much for the Anthropocene.

 

I wondered about what we might leave after reading that.  Some of our skeletons might retain evidence of advance tool use and survival after traumatic injury or serious disease that killed humans of earlier ages.  They might find intriguing other bits here and there and attempt to figure out how we lived.

[chrismackey]

Thanks very much, Siteseer

[cngodles]

Too bad funeral homes don't offer burial in low oxygen sediment in a warm shallow sea as an option. Some curious being 100 million years from now could find you, clean you up with whatever their version of fossil preparation tools is, and display you in a museum. At first they would have you in the wrong position, sort of like we did with dinosaurs. Then eventually through research and more creative thinking, they would start to get it correct.

 

There also is the frozen in ice or thrown in a beat bog option. But ice has run the gamut of covering the entire planet to being completely gone. So there is no guarantee there.

 

Your best bet would likely to be placed somewhere on the moon I would assume. Perhaps below the surface. Since geologic processes there are very scaled back compared to earth, and without oxygen, etc attacking your remains, you might be in some sort of shape 100 million years from now. Someone more knowledgeable than me about gamma radiation and lack of a protective atmosphere could correct me there.

 

Perhaps the time portal opens up and they are left on the moon. And people in the future find them as the moon is explored.

[thelivingdead531]

On 6/30/2021 at 4:11 PM, chrismackey said:

Would any metal, specifically colbalt chrome fossilize? I'm asking because I have a book where a time portal opens to 65 million years ago, a character stabs another and the blade breaks off in the dead man's chest, and he gets buried under a mudflow. They find his fossilized remains in the present day, but would the broken blade still be stuck in his bones? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

I don’t have any sort of answer, but what is the title of the book? It sounds intriguing.

[darrow]

On 6/30/2021 at 5:11 PM, chrismackey said:

Would any metal, specifically colbalt chrome fossilize?

Fossilization only applies to formally living organisms so no metal can not fossilize.

 

On 6/30/2021 at 5:11 PM, chrismackey said:

...would the broken blade still be stuck in his bones?

Perhaps more likely than his bones being fossilized.

 

The chances of preserving the remains of any animal or plant over 65 million years are extremely low and highly dependent on the organic material and the environment where the remains come to come to rest.  Similarly, the chances of preserving a metal knife are also extremely low, highly dependent on the specific alloy of the metal and the environment where knife comes to rest.

 

That being said, cobalt-chromium alloys are far from “standard metal” instead being classed as a superalloy being highly resistant to corrosion with outstanding hardness, toughness, and specific strength depending on the ratio of cobalt to chromium.  Cobalt-chromium alloys are also exhibit self-passivation in the presence of oxygen spontaneously forming a film of chromium oxide protecting the metal from further oxidation.  (Machinegun and autocannon barrels are often coated with a cobalt-chromium alloy to reduce erosion typically doubling the useful life of the barrel)

 

My opinion is in most environments the cobalt-chromium knife blade would be much more likely to survive 65 million years than the fossilized bones of the man in which it was embedded.  

 

That the knife blade could be fractured in human tissue is itself surprising suggesting an abnormally high cobalt content.

[Tidgy's Dad]

I guess diamonds would survive as well as other some precious / semi-precious stones. They'd show evidence of tooling. And gold, though squished out of shape. 

They'd find thousands and thousands of these engagement and wedding ring 'artefacts' like finding arrowheads today. 

[FranzBernhard]

1 hour ago, Tidgy's Dad said:

And gold, though squished out of shape. 

They'd find thousands and thousands of these engagement and wedding ring 'artefacts' like finding arrowheads today. 

This also very much depends on the "fossilization" environments. Gold can be quite soluble/mobile in the right natural environment. It can be dissolved somewhere and redeposited elsewhere. As far as I know, many of these big gold nuggets have formed in the soil zone or at least nor far below.

 

1 hour ago, Tidgy's Dad said:

I guess diamonds would survive as well as other some precious / semi-precious stones.

Yes, even a common quartz-rich rock may be a good bet. For example, I have a quite angular and quite isometric, about 5 cm large, dark grey quartz pebble (possibly a dark vein quartz, but I am not sure) from my 80 million years old hunting grounds. It was found in conglomerate between some rudists (well, they also survived!). Edges are not 100% sharp, but surprisingly well defined. And, of course, it does not look worked. It survived an orogeny with some tilting and faulting and about 100°C. But that´s ok, the calcareous rudists also survived . Its easy to imagine to have a flint tool or something similar preserved in this rocks. That would be a real surprise .

 

Its really, really fascinating - what survives during millions of years and what not. And why!

 

Franz Bernhard

[Tidgy's Dad]

And fossil collections could really confuse future rock hounds. 

Trilobites, ammonites, Meg teeth all in the same deposit. 

[FranzBernhard]

1 hour ago, Tidgy's Dad said:

Trilobites, ammonites, Meg teeth all in the same deposit.

Wouldn´t it be a marker bed for the anthropocene ?

Franz Bernhard

[Top Trilo]

1 hour ago, Tidgy's Dad said:

And fossil collections could really confuse future rock hounds. 

Trilobites, ammonites, Meg teeth all in the same deposit. 

Yep imagine if you found a museum deposit.

[sagacious]

Cobalt chromium knives, at least, are non-fiction.  This is a Rob Simonich design cobalt chromium (aka talonite or stellite) knife.  The metal is actually silver in coloration, but it reflects anything nearby.  Cobalt chrome has a unique slippery feel to it. This knife has gotten a lot of use and abuse over several decades of cleaning ocean salmon, and of course doesn't stain in salt water. 

 

The cobalt content of the knife is actually soft, not brittle.  It's the hard chromium carbide particles in the cobalt matrix that allow the knife to hold an edge for a long time. Cobalt chrome alloys are used for some surgical hip-joint replacements, evidently in large part because the alloy is fracture resistant -- so maybe that part of the story is more toward the fictional side.

 

 

[Oxytropidoceras]

What parts of our technology might be preserved in the rock record is discussed by:

 

Zalasiewicz, J. and Freedman, K., 2009. The earth after us: 

What legacy will humans leave in the rocks?. Oxford University Press.

 

and

 

Weisman, A., 2008. The world without us. Macmillan.

 

Yours,

 

Paul H.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Oxytropidoceras
fine-tuned wording

[siteseer]

38 minutes ago, Oxytropidoceras said:

What parts of our technology might be preserved in the rock record is discussed by:

 

Zalasiewicz, J. and Freedman, K., 2009. The earth after us: 

What legacy will humans leave in the rocks?. Oxford University Press.

 

and

 

Weisman, A., 2008. The world without us. Macmillan.

 

Yours,

 

Paul H.

 

Thanks Paul.  I think the book I leafed through was Weisman's "The World without Us."

 

Jess